1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the asynchronous real-time retrieval of data. Various aspects of the present invention are particularly applicable to the asynchronous real-time retrieval of data from a corporate database to a remote device, such as a wireless telephone or personal digital assistant.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, digital information has become more and more important to people of all walks of life. As the importance of digital information has increased, the need for convenient remote access to a variety of types of digital information has increased as well. For example, traveling businessmen may desire continual access to information contained in electronic spreadsheets, attorneys may desire access to word processing documents from a client's location, and students may want to send or retrieve electronic mail while in school.
In order to address this need, many communication service providers allow their customers to access remote digital information through a communication network. For example, a wireless telephone service provider may allow its customers to use their wireless telephones or other communication devices to send and receive retrieve electronic mail, retrieve image information from a network, obtain contact information from a centralized database, or the like. Similarly, some companies have established remote high-speed Internet connections, both wired and wireless, at public locations such as restaurants, hotels, and airports, which can be accessed by a customer's computer.
While communication service providers have created an infrastructure that potentially allows their customers remote access to digital information, many practical issues still prevent this infrastructure from being fully utilized. For example, some customers seek to access digital information stored behind a barrier, such as digital information stored in their employer's database and protected by a firewall. With this arrangement, if the employer's network did not support an access tool allowing external connections through the firewall then a customer would be prevented from accessing the desired digital information through the communication service provider's network. These access tools include, for example, the use of a virtual private network (VPN) or similar techniques for enabling secure and authenticated connections from devices not directly connected to the employer's network. Moreover, even if the employer's network supported such a tool, the customer's communication device could still not access the data if the user's device itself was not configured to support that tool.
In other situations, a customer may attempt to use an unsuitable communication device to retrieve data. For example, a user may attempt to employ a personal digital assistant or wireless telephone with a relatively simple browser to retrieve a Web page with a large amount of image or audio data. Before the large amount of data can be fully retrieved, the personal digital assistant or wireless telephone may “time out” and sever the connection. Alternately or additionally, the user may seek to download more data than the personal digital assistant or wireless telephone may store.